C/O Berlin Talents 2009
Talents 14
Bare, sparsely furnished rooms and introverted women and girls, barely present to their surroundings—the starkly reduced photographs of Oskar Schmidt are both portraits and interiors. The people and spaces seem familiar, but they remain mysterious and slightly beyond reach. These pictures do not focus on the individual characteristics of the places and people, but much more generally on their forms and postures. The women and girls portrayed are revenants, characters appropriated from the history of art and brought back to life in a new medium: photography. The strict reduction in the series treats what is visible in the photographs as a collection of well-known signs—but signs that are disassociated from their original context and not immediately legible ...
Talents 15
The places in the photos seem familiar, the people almost recognizable, the situations common, everyday. They show normality—so normal that it’s disconcerting. Where and when were the photographs taken? Who are the people in them? How are they connected? In the search for details that might provide answers, the viewer cannot find or decipher either meanings and identities, or relationships and histories in the photographs of Anne Lass. They are images of deindividualized people who find themselves in places devoid of history – documents of disorientation and interchangeability. Anne Lass’ skillful experimentation with anonymity and the lack of references is what makes her photographs so fascinating ...
Talents 16
In Christoph Engel’s photographs, he looks at the world and its surface structures from a different point of view from our everyday perspective. In them, dense housing developments take on the appearance of an ornamental mesh of interwoven lines. The flat roofs of countless greenhouses become a thick mosaic carpet. Golf courses in a barren, rocky landscape suddenly start to look like the palm of an outstretched hand, and the outlines of farm fields could almost pass for a pattern of sequins adorning decorative cloth. Detailed structures of natural and urban landscapes merge in the distance into expansively laid out constructions ...
Talents 17
When you embark on a trip, you’re bound to have some experiences. That can certainly be said of Maggie, a young woman who has kept a colorful photo diary of all the places she has visited—from the beach in Pensacola, Florida, to the mountains of Monticello, Utah. She poses in the usual tourist style before sunsets at the water’s edge, picturesque landscapes, and modern architecture. The only odd thing about these travel photos is Maggie herself: in them she is always hiding her true identity behind a mask. Furthermore, her clothing often corresponds subtly with her surroundings ...
In 2009 Barbara Honrath, Goethe Institut, Felix Hoffmann, C/O Berlin, Ulrike Crespo, Anne-Marie Beckmann, Collection Deutsche Börse, Jörg Sasse, artist and
Timothy Persons chose the best positions.